does a person weigh less in higher altitude?

Sure... your weight (gravity's pull on you) is different at altitude. The higher you are (the further away from the earth you are) the less pull the earth has on you so you become lighter with altitude. So...say you weigh 100 pounds and you made it to the top of Mount Everest (elevation 8,850 meters). At that peak you weight 0.28% less or .28 pounds less (you weigh 99.72 pounds now)! To complicate things a bit the air is thinner at the top of Mt. Everest so you a bit less buoyant. So then you think that the Space Shuttle astronauts are floating free of gravity? Wrong! They are about 250 miles from the surface of the eath and still experincing 90% of earth's gravitation pull. There apparent weightlessness comes from the fact they are orbiting... in free fall. The center of the earth has no gravity either. If the earth were a solid object and there was a hole that went all the way through and you fell into it you would experience less and less gravity until it reached zero at the ... more